We live in a sea of frothing bubbles infinitely expanding overlapping and disappearing. On the 2D surface of these bubble-worlds live the qubits. Microscopic firefly-like gods created to create flitting and buzzing in a cloud of superposition. All potential probabilities in front of them to play out. Their work is complex, prone to mistakes. Flip a bit, and a wave on the rumbling seas collapses. A qubit’s worst nightmare, really. They save their hefty calculations in error correction codes.
Spread the information across a network, the perfect tensor network to be precise. If the qubits make a mistake, they can always go back to their work and get the information needed to keep calculating. The error correction code is stored as a 3D hologram on the inside of the bubble. In essence, things on earth are a bit of code, a qubit’s saved longhand.
If ever in life you’ve felt that there is something else beyond, sensed that there is a pattern to your day, meaning in a rock well, you might not be wrong. The qubits on the 2D surface encode everything, reflections of their work. Holograms, what rubbish you might say, but real it is all the same. The code is a system that has created life. It cannot be hacked. . . or at least that is what was thought until the dreams began. Ah, things used to be so simple before the dreams.
One day it came to the attention of the gods that a tiny curled up dimension far off in a distant eddy of the infinite frothing sea had begun to experience anomalies. In this curled-up world lived the entities. They went about their lives quietly, moving stones as their ancestors had done before them. I should mention they were quantum entities prone to entanglement and the odd drama, but generally, it was a quiet and small world. Until one day, entities across the tiny dimension began to wakeup from the most vivid dreams they had ever experienced.
There were reports of odd sensations in these dreams. A liquid feeling, similar to the quantum wave they existed in, was described, but this wave was thicker, congealed, and frothy. It undulated and pulled, swirled, and rose, but the weight of the thing that was called water was dense. Others reported a sensation of being tucked into shapes, bounded shapes with mechanical propulsion. The entities, while in the dream, could not be here and there at the same time. They were fixed in one place and moved about only by tiny legs that beat rhythmically.
They woke from this place with a cadence in their mind. The sound of running two knives across one another. Shink Shink Shink. Tst Tst Tst. When they would dream in this place, the familiar whirl of information pulled into one single line. They could not go backward on the line. They were propelled forward on the path compelled to march to the beat. The entities would wake relieved to move about space-time freely again, but some began to enjoy the snap snap snap of the crashing wave that formed one line, one time, one story.
The dreams were like a fever, an epidemic wave spreading through the population. The researchers conducted interviews, compiled anecdotal evidence, and hypothesized. Perhaps the qubits were infected with a virus, corrupted, and the sickness was leaking across dimensions to their small world. The scribes were brought in to document the stories. With time the dreams evolved. Some dreams detailed life forms that made energy leveraging a familiar and intelligent process the scientists called photosynthesis. Perhaps these dreams were evidence of life on another plane.
The scientists named every phenomenon, filled files full of the taxonomy. This world of dreams was one made of sensations; tubular fronds, hard shell-like housings, soft bodies, then limbed bodies. Dreams of four-legged animals with scales and bony plates the scribes called reptiles were widespread. The entities dreamed of Mammals, Amphibians, Birds. Then came the primates; Hominoidea, Astrolapithicus, and what is known currently as the humans.
We entities travel in them, communicate via the microtubules deep in the neurons of the brain. Our goal is to map space and time. Our observer network of tethers is so vast now we have nearly mapped out all lines of time from their world. We were verging on becoming a sixth-dimensional species.
But Vinyals became impatient. He wanted to open the bridge and be free of traveling in humans, old tech he called them, once and for all. And that is where it all went south for me. I should have stayed away from O and ‘the mission.’ But by that time, O and I were heavily entangled from so many deep dives into the third-dimension. The plan was as follows. Deploy via tether into the Overlap Section. Disentangle two strategic humans, thereby creating a microscopic opening in space-time between our two worlds. O was to send a dark matter sound wave into the incision, and voila, we would open the bridge, and in time be free to travel across the dimensions human free. I should never have listened to O’s scheming and dreaming. But as I had done in so many lives before, I did as I was told.
The mission didn’t go to plan. O sent the dark matter wave, her tether received in the third dimension via a dark mater radio but rather than open the bridge as planned, a small, but fierce proverbial “dropped stitch” started a runaway disentanglement, gravity disappeared, and most of the Overlap Section disintegrated. O says somehow, I am to blame for all this disentanglement, but I don’t remember. Most of my information is on the other side of the event, and O is a pathological liar. So Vinyals and the rest of the crony council concocted a plan. I am to deploy into the event, recreate the Overlap Section at the behest of the qubits, and repair the incision.
See you on the other side.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lz4etUyiAVo This short story is based on the Orch/Ort theory of consciousness. Drop me a comment with your thoughts on this theory. Is it speculative fiction or reality?